Friday, October 3, 2008

The bill the Senate passed is a fake. It has no checks and balances. The oversight committee can only observe; it has no power actually to act. The Treasury Secretary will still be the sole person empowered to manage our nation's economy. The CEOs of failed companies can only receive a million dollars a month, but that restriction is only on paper. In reality, there are enough loopholes to make that provision meaningless. And are we, the taxpayers, ever going to retrieve any of that money, as we've been told? Forget that; this bill doesn't provide for it. It only provides for a President to decide whether to apply for that on our behalf.

The Senate added a lot of pork to the bill, targeted at the states of the balking Congressmen, to induce them to vote for the bailout bill. That's the carrot. The stick, according to one Congressman from California, is that our legislators have been told if they do not pass this thing, their own pensions will disappear. Also, they have been told the stock market will fall 2,000 points in a single day and a further 1,000 after that and then martial law will have to be imposed.

Our democracy is going to be in tatters either way.

And voting for Barack Obama will not even begin to address the problem. (Neither will voting for McCain, of course. Or anybody else.)

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comments:

It would at least be a principled vote. That's what matters in the end, when we are called to give account before the Dread Judgment Seat. (Unlike my niece, I don't give a hoot whether the President of the U.S. does or doesn't believe in evolution.) I'm just looking for somebody who sincerely believes in the Constitution. I beleive Ron Paul does.

But what can he do at this point? The coup is accomplished. Your mortgage, your bank, your investments, and your entire financial system are now controlled by the government, and specifically by one man whose decisions can be reviewed but not changed. By anybody.

That's on top of the fact that you have for some time lived in a country that spreads its influence abroad by intimidation and force of arms, that uses torture, where you can legally disappear in the middle of any night, where your library and telephone company are required to keep tabs on you for your government.

And you thought (did you? I did.) the Republican Party stood for smaller government!

The only bright spot is that the entire House of Representatives is up for re-election this year. But even if we had the good sense to replace every single one of them of either party who voted for this form of tyranny, we've arrived at such a point that we'd only be replacing them with a fresh batch of crooks.

I voted for Paul in the primaries as my "statement" vote with the intention of voting for whoever won the Republican nomination in the general election. Something about Paul leaves me a bit uneasy, but he's still a possibility. I've also considered writing in Bobby Jindal. Bob Barr isn't out of the question, though I must admit that I have an ingrained knee-jerk bent against the Libertarian Party.